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Harp Regulation

A guest post by my wife, Jennifer Moss

I asked Steve a while back if I could contribute a blog post to the Harp Herald. I share Steve with harpists across America for about ½ the year, so I figured it was time I shared a little about what it’s like to be at home with him during the other half of the year.

One of the most common questions we get is if our daughters play the harp. No, they don’t play the harp. But they are musically inclined. They did take lessons from two amazing teachers, however, and we have a blue Lyon and Healy Folk Harp. Our younger daughter has actually gone to sleep every night for the last five years listening to harp music. Annie’s favorite: Anne Lobotzke’s Daughter of the Stars. Runners up: Suzuki Book 1, and Park Stickney’s Still Life with Harp.

To answer the next-most-asked question: Yes, it’s hard to have Steve on the road so much. Steve’s gone about 2 weeks a month. Sometimes more. Often, it’s hard. Sometimes, he comes back and it’s been so easy that we hardly realize he’s been gone. But, other times, it’s tough. My girls think I only know how to cook out of Trader Joe’s boxes. When we moved to Oregon, Steve was on the road. Moving to West Lafayette, Indiana, this summer however, Steve was with us for the move, and for a couple weeks afterward, too. (Score!)

I’m proud when I think that in some circles he’s famous. He described a time when he worked on a family’s harp, and the daughter was super excited that “Steve Moss, the guy from the video, was actually IN her HOUSE!” He’s in my house, too, but he hasn’t made a video with instructions on how to find the missing earring in the sink trap, or how to make the kids’ favorite dinner, Walnut Pasta with Parmesan.

Our older daughter goes to Interlochen Arts Academy, studying opera. A harpist friend stopped her one day and said, “Hey, Liza, Steve Moss is your dad, right? Oh wow! Mrs. Holland was talking about your dad in class today!” The other girl thought it was so cool that Liza’s dad was some kind of harp celebrity, but Liza shrugged. He’s just her dad, to her.

We joke about people who have jobs with niche markets smaller than his. We thought about writing a book, profiling people with jobs that are more “niche” than his, but someone beat us to the punch.

So what does Steve do for fun at home? He writes songs, plays the grand assortment of musical instruments we own – from an electric guitar to a clawhammer banjo, to the violin, and the cardboard box bass. He has a cardboard harp kit on his workbench right now, and the remains of a coffee can banjo in a drawer. When he’s not building, rebuilding, or playing instruments, Steve is also a Brown Belt in ATA Taekwondo, which he does with our younger daughter, Annie, and he has been making awesome electronic music with prerecorded samples. His current project: making a tiny lathe out of the motor of a vintage sewing machine. Stay tuned to the Harp Herald to see if he decides to turn columns for the world’s smallest harp!

People often ask me if I’ll replace all the strings when they bring their harp in for a regulation. A smaller number of people assume that a regulation includes all new strings and are surprised (and disappointed) to find out that this isn’t the case. While I may replace a string or two at a regulation appointment, and I’ll often replace the bass wires, complete restringing requires a significant additional investment of time, and thus carries an extra labor charge. Then there’s the strings, which on a full sized pedal harp can cost close to $500 for a full set.

I am always glad when my customers are willing to invest in new strings. A lot of harpists tend to leave strings on their harps longer than they should. I often work on harps whose strings have lost much of their tonal quality and sustain. I am happy to schedule the additional time to restring a harp before regulating it. However, I can’t offer the same-day service I can offer for a standard regulation. In order to completely restring and regulate a harp, I generally request that the customer leave it with me for three days.

The reason for this time lag is that brand new harp strings don’t hold their tuning well enough for me to accurately regulate the harp’s intonation. Ideally, there should be a two-week lag between the day a harp is restrung and the day it is regulated, and someone should tune the new strings at least once a day.

Since my road service regulation stops rarely last two weeks, I have to compress this “string settling and stretching” period down to a couple of days. I do this by tuning the harp over and over, accelerating the settling process. After two days of intensive tuning, while the strings will still stretch to some degree, they will hold their tuning well enough to complete the pitch regulation process.

If you are interested in having your harp both restrung and regulated, please contact me in advance. We’ll need to work out a time for you to leave the harp with me, and there are decisions to make about which strings to order. You can use strings you already have on hand, but I caution you not to bother with them if they are more than five years old. Strings age even sealed in a package, so if your spare set goes back more than that, it’s better to throw them out and start fresh.

I’ll be setting up shop somewhere in Las Vegas in Mid-to-late February of 2010. I’ve been there once before, and have a few customers who have been kind enough to ask me back. Overall, though, this is a new territory for me. If you happen to be a harpist in the area, please get in touch if there’s anything I can do for you. If you know a harpist in the Las Vegas area, won’t you mention this blog entry to them or direct them to my website? Remember, I’m authorized to do the free first year warranty regulations on Lyon & Healy and Salvi Harps, as well as other warranty repairs. Again, let me know if there’s anything I can help you with, and spread the word!

You may have heard that you need to replace your strings before a regulation. Why, you may ask? Do you have to change all of them or only some? You’re hiring a technician. Why can’t he or she do them, for crying out loud? Let’s explore the answers to these questions.

I generally recommend that harpists replace the first and second octave strings on their pedal harps at least two weeks prior to a regulation appointment. The reason for this is that in the upper register of the harp, string condition has a strong bearing on the accuracy of pitch regulation – that is on whether your harp remains in tune when you change pedal positions. In this high register, where the strings are very short, any change in the position of the harp’s nuts and discs will have a noticeable effect on pitch. The more a disc “grips” a string, or pushes it at an angle, when the disc is engaged, the sharper the pitch will be. The less a disc grips a string, the flatter it will be.

All strings develop divots over time at the exact points where the discs engage them. Essentially, a string slowly wears away at the point of contact, thereby slightly reducing the disc’s grip on the string. this reduction in grip may not have any effect on 3rd, 4th, and 5th octave strings. With their relatively long speaking lengths, reductions in grip have less of an effect in relation to the overall length of the string. In the first and second octaves, however, the grip reduction caused by worn strings is significant relative to the short length of each string. In plain language, on worn strings, the natural and sharp positions will tend to be flat even if the open string is in tune.

While replacing all the harp’s strings can certainly make it sound better, for the purposes of regulation, your harp benefits the most from new first and second octave strings. Now, why does the technician want you to do this ahead of time? Because new strings don’t hold pitch, and it will be difficult to accurately calibrate the action to play in tune if the string itself is stretching like a rubber band. It’s not that technicians don’t want to change strings for you. We would be happy to have the additional work (and the additional labor charge). But in order to do the best regulation possible on the day of your appointment, the strings should be installed ahead of time, then tuned regularly until they are willing to hold pitch reasonably well. If you know you need your harp restrung AND regulated, talk to your technician ahead of time about dropping the harp off early. If he or she restrings and then tunes it aggressively for a few days (rather than two weeks), it should hold tune well enough to regulated.

Let’s look at each of these points in a little more detail. A pedal harp regulation always includes replacing the pedal felts, even if they don’t look ripped or worn out. Pedal felts compress over time. In addition to making your pedal action louder, this actually throws pedal rods and the playing mechanism out of adjustment. Your technician will replace the felts before doing any adjustments, to bring the harp closer to its original specifications.After the felts are replaced, the pedal rods may need a slight adjustment to compensate for the normal “bellying,” or slight pulling up of the soundboard that occurs over time.

The next step in a harp regulation is locating and eliminating unwanted noise. Your technician will move the pedals or levers to different positions and play each string, listening for noises that weren’t eliminated by the felt and pedal rod adjustments described above. While it’s not always possible to eliminate every unwanted noise a harp makes, many annoying sounds can be eliminated.

Finally, the technician will check and optimize the harp’s intonation. He or she will play each string in each pedal or lever position, compare the pitches on an electronic tuner, and make adjustments to insure that the half-step increments between each position are as perfect as possible.

How often does a harp need regulation? That depends on how much you play, how hard you play, and how high your standards are. Most busy professional pedal harpists have their harps regulated once a year. Part time or casual players and new students can usually wait two to three years or more. Lever harps require less maintenance. I generally recommend having a lever harp serviced once every five years or so, as long as the player isn’t experiencing any problems.